A Lady of Good Family (16 page)

“H
ave you seen him?” was the first thing Beatrix said to me when she arrived in Paris. Her time in Scotland had not dulled that longing.

“I ran into him at the Louvre. He was standing in front of a Madonna that he thought looked like you.” Cleaves took her hat and coat and I led her by the hand into the sitting room. Jenny was in there, curled up in a window seat with a book, and when she saw us, she closed her book and came to give Beatrix a hug.

“She’s so grown up,” Beatrix said when Jenny left us to chat alone. “Even taller than when I saw her last.” I could tell she did not wish to discuss Amerigo, not yet. There are times when all we want to do is talk about the beloved, say his name over and over. And there are other times when even his name must be kept close, guarded like a secret.

“I think Jenny has a beau,” I sighed. “The governess says she’s awfully eager to walk in the same area of the park every day,
where medical students from the Sorbonne gather. I can’t imagine where or how she met him, but notes have been exchanged, or so I’ve been told. I think it is time for us to return to New York, but Mr. Winters . . .” My voice trailed off. Mr. Winters wished to stay in Paris.

“You look tired,” Beatrix said. “I have been selfish. Tell me how you are.” She sat by the window and looked out over the boulevard, at the passing nurses pushing perambulators, the young girls in their convent school uniforms of white collars and broad-brimmed hats, marching in a single row under the chestnut trees. Soon it would be autumn, my favorite time of year, and those leaves would drop, carpeting the ground with red and gold.

“There was a protest on that street yesterday,” I said. “Laborers demanding higher wages, but Mr. Winters wouldn’t tell me any more about it. We had to stay in all day. Other days, though, I have been busy. Museums, concerts, an evening spent watching a new contraption, a moving picture. It was about a gardener and a watering hose. Very amusing.”

“Then we will continue the amusements,” Beatrix said, leaning forward with excitement. “On Sunday I will take you, or you will take me, since you know your way around better, to Versailles, to see the play of the fountains and Nôtre’s gardens and the orangery. They still have one of his tree-moving machines there, I believe. Imagine moving a fully grown tree.”

“Is that all you plan for your Paris visit?” I asked. “More gardens?”

“No. It is not.” She grew serious, her eyes half closing. There was a conflict in her face, a decision that had to be made that did
not make sense to her. Gardeners like things to make sense. If you plant a peony, you expect a peony. You don’t expect irises to grow in sand or apples to fall from pear trees. She had come to Europe to study gardens. She hadn’t planned on meeting Amerigo, or anyone like him. Such things happened to other women. Not she, who had danced through several seasons without showing a preference for a single partner, who had learned how to end a conversation just as a gentleman was making it a little too earnest. And now apples were falling from pear trees.

“Amerigo sent a note to my hotel, asking to meet with me,” she said, looking out the window again. “I said yes.”

•   •   •   •

T
he next day Beatrix arrived for lunch, bringing her exhausted-looking mother with her. “The doorman is not looking well,” Minnie said by way of greeting. There was accusation in her voice. “He needs bed rest.”

“He has too many children to be a man of leisure,” said Mr. Winters, who had appeared in the doorway. “Don’t encourage him, Minnie. He is a malingerer and always looking for tips. How was the channel crossing?”

“Tolerable. How are you, Mr. Winters?” Minnie was always formal with my husband. There was a distinct lack of warmth between them, and the lack of warmth had turned to a chill since the announcement of Minnie’s divorce proceedings. Mr. Winters didn’t approve, and she knew he didn’t approve.

When a woman marries according to the truth of her heart (which is not the same as wisdom, unfortunately), when she then
raises an excellent daughter born from that marriage, and when the marriage fails and she turns to good works rather than dissipation or despair . . . that woman neither expects nor deserves disapproval.

Mr. Winters disapproved, of both her independence and the upcoming divorce.

He saw Minnie’s situation only from a husband’s point of view, the one that said a wife must endure all for the sake of the vows made, that a wife is a form of property to be managed and maintained. That a wife must always put her husband’s happiness above her own, even when the form of that happiness is a mistress with unnaturally colored hair and a too-loud laugh when she is in public with him. His was a common enough viewpoint.

“We were not born to merely suffer,” Minnie told me once. “And I will not. There is too much that needs to be done in this world for intelligent women to sit back and weep the days away. There is work to accomplish.” She herself, in New York, worked in Bellevue, Presbyterian, and the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled, providing not just the usual crocheted shawls that society women provided at Christmas, but real labor, helping to train nurses in sanitation techniques and bringing in teachers for children with tuberculosis and poliomyelitis who were away from their studies for months at a time. “It gives them courage to know they have to work at their schooling, even if they are ill,” she always insisted.

“You are looking well, Mr. Winters,” Minnie said now, drawing off her gloves. “How was the racing season?”

He grimaced. Polite conversation is a dance around things
that must not be said aloud, but everyone in hearing distance already knows the silent conversation. How much did you wager this year? Minnie was saying. When will you stop?

“Pleasant,” Mr. Winters answered. Mind your own business, he was saying.

“Well,” I said. “What shall we do today? Are you tired, or would you like to walk?”

“Walk,” said Beatrix.

“Rest,” said Minnie at the same time. The very next day would be her first meeting with the lawyers. We decided she should stay in my apartments for the day and put her feet up, gather her thoughts, and make notes for the morrow. “Gird myself for battle, you mean,” she said. “For battle it will be.”

Mr. Winters gave them a tight little smile, the look of offended patrimony. “I, alas, cannot join you,” he said, turned, and left us. It was difficult to love such a man. Understand, I did love him. There were afternoons alone with him, early evenings in bed when he played the lovelorn knight and all was as it should be between man and wife, or close enough.

Such times were scarce that season, but love, for me, was not a seasonal thing. There are things between a man and a woman that are not easily spoken of, but my passion for him was as strong as it had been when we first met. When we were alone, in bed, we were in complete harmony.

“Mr. Winters will be out most of the afternoon,” I reassured Minnie. “If he does come back early, he will probably stay in his study.”

“The rift has not healed, then.” Minnie eyed me sadly.

“It will,” I assured her. “In time.”

Beatrix and I began her tour of Paris with a walk in the Bois de Boulogne, comparing the gardens there to the ones at the Villa Borghese in Rome.

“Still formal, but better maintained, more pleasant for walking,” she decided. “The lines curve and meander. Straight lines are so like a military parade, aren’t they?” She hitched up her skirts slightly so as not to sweep over a marble that had strayed into our path. Children shrieked on the lawn and one young little fellow, debonair in his sailor suit with a rim of jam around his mouth, came to fetch his toy. He looked up at Beatrix, a long way up, and smiled at her, sticking his thumb in his mouth.

We stopped like that, in the middle of an alley of plane trees, and waited for his nanny to fetch him safely back to the circle of children playing on the lawn. She was busy, though, with another child.

A breeze caught the leaves on the trees and shifted sun and shade together in a moving mosaic. There were those who thought the new painters—the Impressionists, they were called—were untalented charlatans, but I liked their work, how they made light and its workings on our eyes a character on the canvas as well as their ballerinas and water lilies.

“Athena no longer sucks her thumb,” I said.

“You sound sad. Surely that is a good thing.”

“She is my last baby, and soon she will be all grown up.”

“Not that soon,” Beatrix argued back. “There are mumps and multiplication tables and the first afternoon dance to be got through. It will be a while yet before she packs her trunks.”

“You are making fun of me.”

“Never.” She slipped her arm through mine. “I am trying to cheer you.”

“I thought I was to cheer you. You are seeing Paris under trying circumstances.”

“There will always be trying circumstances. The point is to take a good look around, get your bearings. Soldier on.” There was a softness in her smile that made me think Paris would not simply be a matter of soldiering on for her. Had they met yet, she and Amerigo?

The jam-mouthed child in the sailor suit picked up his wayward marble, made a clumsy little bow to Beatrix, and scuttled up the little hill to his friends.

“When I saw Signor Massimo at the Louvre last week, he said he would like to take us to the opera. Minnie as well,” I told her as we walked on.

“Yes. He told me in his letter.”

“I doubt he can afford a party of that type,” I said. “He is here to sell a family heirloom.”

“
The Wolf of Gubbio
. A pretty little painting. I’m sorry he has to part with it.”

“You’ve seen it?”

“Yes.”

So. There had been a second visit to the palazzo on the Via dei Serpenti. Perhaps a third or fourth?

“You know, Daisy, there was something in the painting, some expression in the wolf’s face, that reminds me of Mrs. Haskett.”

“She is here as well,” I said. “In Paris.”

Beatrix stopped walking. “Mrs. Haskett seems to be everywhere I go,” she said. “It can’t simply be bad luck.”

“It seems to me she is everywhere Signor Massimo goes.”

“We do seem to have made some awful threesome.”

“Perhaps Edith can write a short story about it.”

“Now you are making fun of me, Daisy. Let’s have a look at the greenhouses,” she said. “They are quite, quite large. Did you know that when the British were chasing Napoléon all over the continent and beyond, they camped here, in the
bois
? Thousands and thousands of trees were cut down to make tent poles and firewood. Most of the trees you see now have been planted in Mother’s lifetime. They are doing quite well. Paris takes its gardens seriously.”

We turned down a little gravel path, shadowy with large trees touching branches overhead.

“The original plan for the park called for all straight lines,” Beatrix continued. “But the designer forgot to measure elevations and ended up with two streams at different altitudes. Haussmann decided to use curving paths rather than straight lines. Much more pleasant, don’t you think? The problem with straight lines is that you see the ending of the path too quickly, so the journey is not worth the while. With a curving path, the garden keeps its mysteries and surprises. The ultimate ending stays hidden and therefore worth exploring.”

She began to hum under her breath, something she rarely did. She often said that humming, rather than singing, felt like trying to run with your ankles hobbled together. But she hummed that day, and if I’m not mistaken, it was an Italian love song.

•   •   •   •

W
hen I saw Beatrix two days later at her hotel, she was no longer humming. She and Minnie had met with the lawyers and with Mr. Jones.

“It was a nightmare,” she said. “The lawyers sneered at Mother. And Father . . . I can barely say the word . . . Father read a letter from Grandmother, blaming everything on poor Mother. It was, she said, even Mother’s fault that he took a mistress. If she had been a proper wife, none of this would have happened.”

Minnie and I had sometimes discussed this penchant for mothers to prefer sons above all others, but especially above daughters. My mother had done so, placing my brother, Raymond, on such a tall pedestal that I could not, in her opinion, even touch his shoes. Minnie’s mother had done the same, and her mother before her, back through time. It was one of the many reasons Minnie had encouraged her daughter, her only child, to be independent, to be more than a woman standing obediently at a man’s side.

“Nonsense,” I said, though we knew many would agree. It was the price of divorce in those days, that irrational judgment and condemnation from people who really were themselves in no position to judge.

Meanwhile, there was the divorce to be gotten through.

“The letter was ridiculous.” Minnie stood in the doorway of her room, immaculate in a white frock and white pearls, her dark hair brushed into a tidy chignon. “We all thought so, even if not everyone said it aloud. I’m only surprised that Freddie didn’t
bring his mistress to the meeting as well. But it is finished. The divorce has been settled.”

She came to join us where we sat at a lace-covered table and poured herself a cup of coffee. If her hand trembled, Beatrix and I pretended not to notice. “Now,” she said, “I get on with my life and my work. Wife no more.” She lifted her chin. “Lovely words. I shouldn’t speak like this in front of my daughter, but we have no secrets, have we, Beatrix?”

Minnie smiled and sat straighter than ever, but her eyes were bright and damp. Much as you might look forward to independence and ending painful relationships, that parting, almost as final as death, is a type of failure, a turning away from a dream you once had, a dream lovely enough to carry you into the future.

Frederic Jones had Paris and his mistress and his set of friends. Except for Beatrix, Minnie was alone.

Poor Beatrix, I thought. First love is difficult enough to navigate, but when one must choose between a lover and one’s mother, between different continents . . . impossible.